Do you know what Dassault Systèmes means when it refers to its solutions as “experiences”? No? Well, DS is trying hard to explain its vision and clear up confusion around the difference between V6, the experiences and the brands (CATIA, DELMIA, ENOVIA,...

PTC has spent the last, well, decade redefining itself. For a long time, it was the feature-based modeling powerhouse in a direct-modeling CAD world. Then it decided CAD was passé and devoted itself to building a PLM platform. Most recently, PTC entered the brave new...

CAE user conferences, for me, are all about fighting to understand. I’m an engineer but not a scientist, so I’m usually OK in these very technical presentations until the equations start flying. Then I can easily veer off-track as I try to figure out...

Overheard last week at Solid Edge University: Customer: ‘This is the best assembly environment I’ve seen.’ Solid Edge guy: ‘Here’s what we’re doing to make it better.’ A lot of similar conversations took place last week at...

A couple of months ago, I wrote that “PTC is such an interesting company. A bunch of really smart people who … get too far ahead of their customers (remember “CAD is dead”?), alienate those who sign the checks while retaining intense loyalty among the user...

A few weeks ago, I was lucky enough to spend a few days at the 2012 Americas edition of Altair’s HyperWorks Technology Conference. Over 800 people heard Altair; T.K. Mattingly of Apollo 13 and Apollo 16 fame and a NASA Space Shuttle pilot; Luca Pignacca, chief...

COFES, the Congress on the Future of Engineering Software, takes place in the Arizona desert each April. Usually, the sun is glorious, the birds sing, the rabbits hop and the 300 or so attendees scurry between sessions and meetings, with the occasional pause by a pool...

Did you know that the weight of a bicycle becomes relevant only when the grade of the road you’re riding on is 8% or higher? The bike’s aerodynamics come into play on flats, uphills and downhills and, it turns out, have a significantly greater impact on a...

SolidWorks World 2012 started off last week with NAO (pronounced “now”) — an utterly adorable 57 cm (just under 2 feet) tall robot from Aldebaran that that seems almost human — breakdancing on screen and on the stage. And it only got better from there. I...

The tagline for the MSC Software user conference last week was “MSC Reloaded” — and, in many ways, that appeared to be the case. I didn’t think to ask, but if the analogy of “aim –> fire –> reload –> fire” is being made, MSC is very...